46 SM I TH

Neo-Impressionism and

the Dream of Realities

Painting, Poetry, Music

Cornelia Homburg

WITH CONTRIBUTIONS BY

Paul Smith

and Laura D. Corey, Simon Kelly, Noelle C. Paulson, and Christopher Riopelle

YALE UNIVERSITY PRESS, NEW HAVEN AND LONDON

IN ASSOCIATION WITH

THE PHILLIPS COLLECTION, WASHINGTON, D.C.

47

The Neo-Impressionist PainterColor, Facture, and Fiction

PAUL SMITH

Famously, the term “Neo-Impressionist” was coined by Félix Fénéon in his article

“L’Impressionnisme aux Tuileries” of September 1886.1 The following month, a

version of this article (lacking the crucial word) was published in the pamphlet Les

Impressionnistes en 1886, along with Fénéon’s “Les Impressionnistes” of May, which

contained his “scientific” account of the style, and one other article.2 This text has

enjoyed considerable authority ever since, and with the telescoping of hindsight, it has

given rise to the belief that Neo-Impressionism was both a new and essentially scientific

version of its Impressionist predecessor.

At the opposite end of the spectrum, in terms of the prestige it has enjoyed,

lies Émile Cohl’s part-animated comic film The Neo-Impressionist Painter of (April) 1910

(fig. 10). At first blush, this makes little attempt to engage with the style of that name

at all, but merely applies it as a catchall pejorative to the series of monochrome can-

vases the painter-protagonist shows to a prospective patron, which are to all intents

and purposes pastiches of the actual monochromes, or “monochroidals,” made by

Cohl, Alphonse Allais, and Paul Bilhaud in the 1880s and 1890s.3 The film nevertheless

does illuminate Neo-Impressionism obliquely, since it engages with lingering concerns

about the incoherence and pretentiousness of Impressionism from which its successor

was never free. More especially, and like many a popular literary fiction, it borrows its

deprecating humor from “serious” or professional art criticism, or from romans à clef

that have identifiable painters among their characters, to express prejudices that found

their way into the popular imagination.4

Neo-Impressionist Idiosyncrasy

An initially puzzling aspect of Cohl’s narrative is that the patron buys all the Neo-

Impressionist’s monochromes, despite being stupefied by them. Far from being per-

verse, however, this decision indicates he is a speculator with an eye for a commodity

that will eventually prove salable precisely because of its eccentricity.5 In this regard,

The Neo-Impressionist Painter rehearses a comic strategy employed in novels such as

Marius Roux’s La proie et l’ombre of 1878, which pilloried the attempts of Cézanne and Detail of cat. 29.

48 SM I TH

his Impressionist colleagues to distinguish themselves as “temperaments” in the art

market.6 It may even be that Cohl chose to call his painter a “Neo-Impressionist” to

suggest that the “new,” and implicitly improved, “Impressionists” were even greater

charlatans than their predecessors.

Cohl was certainly not alone in thinking this way. A few years earlier, in 1904,

a certain O. Chelette had published a comic story entitled “Pour être décoré” about a

Neo-Impressionist painter known as “Bête-en-Tout,” which leaves no doubt about his

pretentiousness:

Bête-en-Tout was a painter to whom his friends had given this name because his

naivety exceeded anything imaginable. Without a shred of talent, he painted, as

though he were a joiner or a cattle merchant, solely because his father, a rich

and conceited bourgeois, wanted his son to become an artist. Painting, in sum,

is an art within the reach of everyone. With a few colors, a brush, and a canvas,

you can always scrawl something that resembles a forest, a swamp, or some

rocks. And when this is unfortunate enough to resemble nothing at all, the artist

still has the option of declaring himself a Neo-Impressionist, and, for want of

buyers, will not be long in finding admirers.7

As in Cohl’s narrative, Bête-en-Tout eventually gains success despite his inepti-

tude, being awarded the Légion d’honneur after agreeing to boycott a banquet held by

his friends in mock protest against his earlier failure to win this very accolade.

Although Chelette is not explicitly concerned with the commodity value of Neo-

Impressionism, the issue had been squarely addressed in the story “Plus ça change,”

published in 1894 by Camille de Sainte-Croix.8 In this, the painter Mauvel, having been

Fig. 10. Émile Cohl, Still from The Neo-

Impressionist Painter (Paris: Gaumont, 1910).

Courtesy Musée Gaumont.

49 THE NEO - IMPRESS ION IST PA INTER

made “the man of the moment” by the publication of compromising letters to his former

mistress, seizes the opportunity to mount an exhibition of his work, with the result that

“without worrying too much whether Mauvel was a Chromoluminarist or Neo-Traditionist,

collectors acting through snobbery, miscalculation, or simply caprice, hiked up the price

of the new brand, and so all at once his fortune was made.”9 Albeit in passing, Saint-

Croix describes here how Neo-Impressionist paintings had the potential to acquire value

at the whim of an irrational market, irrespective of their intrinsic merit, just like any com-

modity that is also a recognizable “brand.”

It could, of course, be argued that Cohl’s film actually suggests that Neo-

Impressionism is not sufficiently quirky to be commercially successful, since the patron

declines all the paintings in that style (or Impressionism) hanging on the studio wall.10 It

nevertheless implies that Neo-Impressionist paintings are not radically different from

their more idiosyncratic monochrome descendants, inasmuch as the patron does buy a

painting that consists of two horizontal bands of color—one blue and one white—that

serve to represent sea and sky when it is seen one way up, and a desert and sky when

it is turned upside down. This work plainly alludes to the “painting with two ends” by the

“Impressionist” painter Marignan, featured in the play La Cigale of 1877, which repre-

sented “on the one hand a sunset over a blue sea, and on the other the burning sands

of the desert surmounted by an azure sky.”11 It would appear, in other words, that Cohl

wished to imply that the undifferentiated monochrome was simply the logical conclusion

of an evolutionary line running from Impressionism through Neo-Impressionism.

A further implication of this argument is that Neo-Impressionism is liable to the

same representational incoherence that afflicted Impressionism, in which an overreli-

ance on color weakened the distinction between figure and ground and left the painting

open to whatever the spectator projected onto it.12 Again, there was nothing new in this

view, as Neo-Impressionism had been criticized in fiction a decade earlier for the depic-

tive aporia produced by its dependence on color. In Jean Lorrain’s story “Déplacement”

of 1895, for example, a certain Simonne d’Héfleurons tells a friend that the paintings

on view in the Salon de la Rose + Croix are “even more involved than Monet’s and

Signac’s,” being “all bathed in the blue halo of a submarine grotto that pierces the soul

and fills you with anguish.”13 Implicitly then, for Lorrain, the Impressionists and Neo-

Impressionists are both tarred with the same brush as the Rose + Croix artists, who

risk allowing a blue tonality to dominate the painting, to the exclusion of what it repre-

sents. But as if to make his point explicit, Lorrain has Simonne reiterate her criticism

when she describes the painting by her aristocratic friend, Antoine de la

Rochefoucauld—which is clearly The Angel of the Rose + Croix he exhibited at the inau-

gural exhibition of 1892—as “a green tachist allegory sulphureted with blue.”14 Although

the painting is untraceable, Rochefoucauld was working in a Neo-Impressionist manner

at the time, and Fénéon describes this particular work as having a “crisp and buoyant

impressionist mosaic.” Lorrain thus unambiguously echoes an argument established

earlier still in criticism: that the Neo-Impressionist painting reduces to a set of stains.

By way of an example, Seurat’s associate, Maurice Beaubourg, made precisely this

Cat. 30. Albert Dubois-Pillet, The Banks of the Marne at Dawn, c. 1888.

Watercolor over traces of black chalk, 6¼ × 8¾ in. (15.8 × 22.2 cm).

J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles.

Cat. 29. Louis Hayet, Banks of the Oise, 1887. Oil on canvas,

215⁄8 × 24¾ in. (55 × 63 cm). Private collection.

52 SM I TH

point when he described Albert Dubois-Pillet’s technique as a “so-to-speak mathemati-

cal tachism” in an obituary article of September 1890.15

Lorrain’s observations about Signac’s and Monet’s excessive blueness ulti-

mately derive from half-serious remarks J.-K. Huysmans and others originally made in

the 1870s about the color-blindness afflicting the Impressionists.16 It was somewhat

predictable, therefore, that Maurice Vaucaire availed himself of this trope in his story

“Après le bonheur” of 1889, in which a bemused visitor to an exhibition of works by “a

dozen intransigent painters” at Georges Petit’s gallery asks for an explanation of their

“violet landscapes and blue nudes.”17 What is noteworthy about this story, however, is

that it refers to Neo-Impressionist color specifically, since it describes how the works

in this exhibition have “frames in pitch-pine with white moldings” of a kind invented by

Louis de Poix, an admirer of Mallarmé and a leading light of the Symbolist Revue des

Idées Neuves. It clearly alludes, in other words, to the frames Camille Pissarro used

when he exhibited at Petit’s Exposition international de peinture et de sculpture in May

and June 1887, and to those employed by Georges Seurat, Paul Signac, Dubois-Pillet,

and Maximilien Luce when they showed at the offices of the Symbolist magazine La

Revue Indépendante or the Théâtre Libre that year.18

What is more unusual and contemporary about this story is that it attacks Neo-

Impressionist facture specifically, criticizing the author of a painting entitled L’Abattoir

for having “made himself stand out by applying his color in dots instead of spreading it

out,” and thereby creating the impression of “an infinite number of minuscule, multicol-

ored fly-droppings.”19 For Vaucaire, that is, the problem with Neo-Impressionism is that

its broken paintwork is so insistently present that it begins to mask the image it is sup-

posed to generate. Predictably, however, Vaucaire says nothing new here, but rather reit-

erates remarks Huysmans made in a review of the 1887 Indépendants about the “fleas”

covering Seurat’s Models of 1887–88 (The Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia).20

A similar argument is made in other stories, which rehearse a gibe Yvanhoé

Rambosson made against Signac’s “confetti” in an article of 1893.21 In Léon Donnay’s

“Les compagnons du gel” of 1899, for instance, the “pointillist” painter Pontferrac is

told that if he wishes to be successful, he must “renounce painting . . . landscapes

that look as though they have been made by means of artillery and confetti.”22 And in

Allais’s story “Un coin d’art moderne” of 1894, “pointillism” is said to be in decline

among the group of “Néo-Pantelants,” admirers of the Symbolist plays of Édouard

Dujardin, on account of their having run out of “confetti.”23 For Allais, then, it is the Neo-

Impressionist’s matière that makes him a figure of fun, rather than his color per se,

which so amused his friend Cohl.

The Impressionists in 1886

Given that Neo-Impressionism had similar comic potential to its Impressionist predeces-

sor, it makes sense to think that Fénéon’s insistence on the “scientific” qualities of the

Grande Jatte of 1884–86 (see fig. 39) in “VIIIe exposition impressionniste” was to some

53 THE NEO - IMPRESS ION IST PA INTER

extent strategic rather than explanatory, or designed to preempt the humorous denigra-

tion of its color and facture by lending them gravitas.

Another reason to be wary of taking Fénéon’s scientific account at face value

is that he first used the term “Neo-Impressionist” in September 1886, precisely to

redress the impression he gave in his May article that the style could be reduced to

science. He thus declares in “L’Impressionnisme aux Tuileries” that “Monsieur Z. can

read treatises on optics for all eternity, but he will never make the Grande Jatte.” Here,

Fénéon also contends that Ogden Rood, whose Théorie scientifique des couleurs of

1881 was so influential for the new generation of painters, only achieves a “paltry”

result when he paints “in between giving courses at Columbia.” And this, he insists, is

because “the Neo-Impressionist method requires an exceptional delicacy of the eye,”

and is not to be mastered by painters who “dissimulate their visual incapacity by means

of digital niceties.”24

It is also important to realize that Fénéon did not regard science as the essen-

tially positivistic, empirical, hypothesis-testing activity of the kind undertaken by Rood.

Rather, he included the thinking of the Idealist mathematician Charles Henry within his

definition of the term, arguing in “L’Impressionnisme aux Tuileries” that the latter’s

“general theory of contrast, rhythm, and measure” would furnish the Neo-Impressionists

“with valuable information.”25 Some sense of the anti-materialistic nature of Henry’s

theory can be gleaned from the fact that he “explained” the universal laws behind the

expressive power of different linear directions, and of the colors matching them, in

terms of a “virtual movement” supposedly taking place in the perceiver’s mind when-

ever sensation occurred.26 But the Idealist eccentricity of Henry’s ideas emerges more

clearly perhaps in Paul Adam’s story “Au jour,” published in La Revue Indépendante in

August 1887, which featured Henry in the guise of the savant, Marc Sapeline,

who has already acquired and consolidated some certainties. Advanced science

is experimenting in order to establish the rhythmic correspondences between

certain musical measures, certain melodies in literary phrases, certain scales of

color, certain lines in visual art, certain muscular tensions, and certain popular

aspirations. And so, we are in a position to say with precision that a given poetic

phrase was engendered by the same rhythm that gave rise to a given political

idea, a given pictorial symphony of color, a given athletic movement, or a given

curve of a statue—in such a way that human acts are simply the movements of

a universal rhythm like those of sidereal gravity, modeling life in all its manifesta-

tions upon itself alone.27

Since he was closely associated with Adam, it must be assumed that Fénéon

understood Henry’s science in similar terms. Moreover, given Henry’s ambitions to

reduce different qualities of aesthetic experience to formulas about “rhythm,” it is likely

that Fénéon would have approved of Georges Vanor’s predictions in L’Art symboliste of

1889 (for which Adam wrote the preface) that in the “mystical” future “science itself . . .

will rise up . . . freed of its slavishness to trial and error . . . recognizing every phenom-

54 SM I TH

enon as a modification of a single fluid, which is transformed into different appearances

according to the intensity of its vibrations.”28

Fénéon was nevertheless concerned that painters were no more servile toward

Henry’s science than Rood’s, gently chastising Seurat in an article of April 1888 for ori-

entating the accoutrements in Models on “a pseudo-scientific whim,” according to the

directions the mathematician considered appropriate to their colors.29 Fénéon was also

equivocal about Henry’s theories themselves in the biography of Signac he published

in Les Hommes d’Aujourd’hui of 1890, in which he not only mentioned how Signac’s

collaboration with Henry had helped establish which lines were “rhythmic” (and hence

pleasing), but also how “this method could perhaps facilitate the mathematical analysis

of Japanese woodblock prints whose autonomous colors are contained within clearly

delineated contours, but it would be wrong to think Monsieur Signac would seek to use it

to make a painting, or Monsieur X. for analyzing the painting subsequently.”30 Fénéon’s

amused skepticism toward Henry’s thinking also finds expression in the curious circular

motif he inserted as a cul-de-lampe to the Signac biography (fig. 11), which he described

as “this so seductive work, a collaboration between Henry and the bottom of a sauce-

pan.”31 Quite what the joke was is obscure, although it may not be unconnected to the

fact that the motif first appeared in La Vogue of May 1886, where it served to illustrate

lines in Gustave Kahn’s poem “Printemps,” describing “the mobile rain of rays of sun-

light” upon “trees whose branches swing with the rhythm of a censer.”32

Doubt is also cast upon the seriousness of Fénéon’s interest in science in the

novel Le roman d’un singe, published by his longstanding friend Armand Charpentier in

1895. In this, Fénéon appeared, transparently, under the guise of Félix Yvonnel, the

critic whom “Impressionist painters consecrated . . . as an aesthete,” but who was con-

stantly in search of new enthusiasms with which to refresh his jaded sensibilities.33 To

this end, Yvonnel takes an interest in the science of Doctor Théodore Halifax, whose

chief aim is to improve the lot of humanity by trepanning male babies (in order to pro-

gram them to follow the careers most suited to their native endowments) and by remov-

ing the ovaries from their female counterparts (so as to relieve women of the need to

give birth, which will be done artificially). The novel is titled after another of Halifax’s

lunatic schemes: his attempt to bring up the monkey, Golo, in the ways of humans.

Inevitably, this causes the poor creature to commit suicide after falling hopelessly in

love with his master’s mistress, while the couple has sex in the room next door. Plainly

enough, Charpentier’s implication is that an interest in science was as much a fashion-

able affectation for Fénéon as a serious intellectual commitment, as befitted a dilettante

who “had only managed to dissipate his talent by working on ephemeral magazines,”

and whose “enthusiasms, however sincere, could not resist a novelty.”34 By extension,

Fénéon’s display of seriousness about science in Les Impressionistes en 1886 should

perhaps be taken with a pinch of salt.

A more indirect reason not to invest too seriously in Les Impressionnistes en

1886 is that the text cannot be entirely dissociated from Fénéon’s notorious proclivity

for “lechery.”35 This is hinted at in Le roman d’un singe, for example, in a long descrip-

Fig. 11. Charles Henry, Cul-de-lampe from Félix

Fénéon, “Paul Signac,” Les Hommes d’Au-

jourd’hui 8, no. 373 (May 1890). Private collec-

tion.

55 THE NEO - IMPRESS ION IST PA INTER

tion of the unmistakable, simultaneously sensuous and intellectual figure cut by

Fénéon, and of his “sweeping but supple gestures and undulating but feline move-

ments” more especially.36 The same movements are also emphasized in the painting

Signac began immediately after the publication of his biography, Opus 217: Against the

Enamel of a Background Rhythmic with Beats and Angles, Tones, and Tints, Portrait of

M. Félix Fénéon in 1890 (fig. 1). And here, too, they have erotic overtones, to judge from

Adam’s Le vice filial of 1891, in which Fénéon, “elegantly garlanded in his gestures,”

appears under his own name, at one point breaking off “a white rose from his button-

hole” to offer it to an opera singer “with the singular gesture fixed by Signac in the por-

trait we saw at the recent exhibition.”37 It would seem that Signac was not oblivious

to this aspect of Fénéon’s persona either, since he noted in a letter to Henri-Edmond

Cross of November 1891 that in this novel “refined beauties (Félix Fénéon among oth-

ers) circulate around the most elegant scenery.”38

What matters about all this is that it helps explain why Fénéon included a long

passage in “VIIIe exposition impressionniste” describing “a young woman visiting,” who,

“seen from the front and standing out in black against the large green rectangle of the

window, sits at the foot of a bed” in a painting of an invalid by David Estoppey.39 She is

evidently the dedicatee of the first numbered copy of the small, limited edition of Les

Impressionnistes en 1886 (fig. 12), which Fénéon inscribed: “To the graceful visitor on

page 18. Ardently F. F.”40 The woman in question cannot be identified any more than the

painting she appears in. It is nevertheless beyond doubt that Fénéon’s desire for her lay

behind his decision to pose for Estoppey during March 1886.41 Nothing so conventional,

however, as a ménage à deux would explain why Fénéon devoted such a long panegyric

to Estoppey’s paintings in “VIIIe exposition impressionniste” as he did, when the artist

showed no paintings whatsoever at this exhibition, or why the critic subsequently men-

tioned Estoppey’s work in a review of the 1887 Indépendants at which he exhibited

nothing either.42

What is plain, at all events, is that Fénéon was perfectly prepared to compro-

mise the contents of Les Impressionnistes en 1886 to realize his amorous intentions.

This being the case, it is not unreasonable to suppose that the motive to cultivate a

glamorous and fashionable persona informed those sections of the text touching on

modern optics. That Yvonnel indulges, in Le roman d’un singe, in an “unbridled pas-

sion” with Clara Gibsenne, a courtesan and freethinker with a fervent interest in “sci-

ence,” would also suggest that sex and science made a formidable combination as far

as Fénéon was concerned.43

The Dream

The most compelling reason, however, for distrusting Fénéon’s early scientific account

of Neo-Impressionism is that he effectively refuted this in his article “Le Néo-

impressionnisme” of July 1887, where he stated outright that for “Dubois-Pillet, Signac,

Seurat . . . objective reality is simply a pretext for the creation of a higher and subli-

Fig. 12. Félix Fénéon, Les Impressionnistes en

1886 (Paris: La Vogue, 1886), copy no. 1 with a

dedication from the author. Pierre Saunier,

Paris.

56 SM I TH

mated reality,” and declared that their aim was to “synthesize the landscape in a defini-

tive aspect that perpetuates its sensation.”44 Neo-Impressionism, by this account, is

less about science, then, and more about the “eternal” quality of things, as Seurat put

it in a conversation with Kahn, or how they appear inside what the Symbolists called the

“dream.”45 Kahn put the matter much the same way in his article “La vie artistique” of

April 1887, which clearly draws on his conversation with Seurat: “Armed with a new pro-

cedure . . . they have aimed to render not how the landscape looked at some particular

moment but the silhouette it has for the whole day. Turning to the human figure . . . they

have attempted to recreate it synthetically: all contortion, all movement connected with

joy or suffering being transient, they have suppressed these, and have tried to give the

moderns passing by a little of the hieratic quality and eternal quality of antique statues.

. . . In this respect their aims coincide with those of the new writers.”46

Adam had made a closely similar argument much earlier, in “Peintres impres-

sionnistes” of May 1886, a review of the eighth Impressionist exhibition, in which

he assimilated the “stipplings” of the style’s most recent variety to a confused but

strongly Idealist and solipsistic aesthetic, drawn ultimately from the philosopher Arthur

Schopenhauer.47 Here, for example, Adam argues that Seurat and his colleagues, like

the first-generation Impressionists, have the “analytical” aim of capturing “the pure phe-

nomenon, the subjective appearance of things,” rather than some “imaginary objective

reality,” or what Schopenhauer called the world as “representation.”48 Adam then contin-

ues by implying how the new generation also employed “synthesis” to express the ideal

character that things assume when the world is seen sub specie aeternitatis, or as

what Schopenhauer called “idea,” asserting: “It is necessary to . . . pursue the subjec-

tivity of apperception to its most abstract formula. . . . The varied and melodious form

of the Primitives suits the new generation . . . one can see the same concern to prune

Fig. 13. Albert Dubois-Pillet, The Seine at Bercy,

1885. Oil on canvas, 59 × 90½ in. (150 × 230

cm). Musée Crozatier, Le Puy-en-Velay, France.

57 THE NEO - IMPRESS ION IST PA INTER

details that distract the eye and scatter the attention in favor of overall synthesis.”49

Like Kahn, then, Adam seizes upon the simplified and hieratic silhouettes, reminiscent

of Egyptian statuary, that Seurat used in the Grande Jatte to represent the typical (as

opposed to individual) bourgeois Parisian. His remarks also suit Signac’s Apprêteuse

et garnisseuse (modes), rue du Caire of 1885–86 (Foundation E. G. Bührle Collection,

Zurich), which was exhibited alongside Seurat’s painting, and which employs a similar

style expressing comparable Idealist commitments.

Adam did not confine his account of the Impressionism of the new generation to

this article, but also proselytized the work of Dubois-Pillet, Signac, and Seurat in his

remarkable novel Soi, which appeared in the same month. Here, however, the paintings

described are all more traditionally Impressionist in style and, accordingly, Adam empha-

sizes their subjective rather than their synthetic character, for the most part. He nonethe-

less implies that they correspond to states of mind akin to the “dream” in the narrative,

which details how the protagonist, Marthe Grellou, comes to appreciate Impressionism

as she lapses increasingly into a state of extreme solipsism. More particularly, Marthe

undergoes her damascene conversion toward the end of the novel, when she finds she

is “delighted to grasp this new art” in the form of a painting by “Vibrac” (a painter mod-

eled on Pissarro and Signac), which achieves an “extreme division of tones,” even

though she had been “ready in advance to criticize this luminous impasto.”50 Marthe

thus readily concurs with her nephew, Karl’s, view that this work, which is actually

Dubois-Pillet’s Seine at Bercy of 1885 (fig. 13), captures the subjective “impression.”

Further on in the same passage, when Marthe looks at paintings by Seurat,

Signac, Pissarro, and Armand Guillaumin, there is nevertheless a suggestion that these

artists also express the ideal aspect of things. This comes from the fact that Adam

employs the same very peculiar prose style to describe these works that he uses to char-

Fig. 14. Paul Signac, Notre Dame and the Île

Saint-Louis, View of the Quai de la Tournelle,

Sunlight, 1884. Oil on canvas, 197⁄8 × 31¼ in.

(50.5 × 79.5 cm). Von der Heydt-Museum,

Wuppertal.

58 SM I TH

acterize the “condensed dreams” into which Marthe occasionally falls, reserving the use

of verbs for descriptions of how phenomena form patterns or two-dimensional motifs.51

So, for example, Adam relates Marthe’s experience of a “Signac,” which is clearly Saint-

Briac, the Sailor’s Cross, High Tide of 1885 (Dixon Gallery and Gardens, Memphis), thus:

“A blue sea climbs up, rhythmically punctuated by a line of islets diminishing into the dis-

tance, where a brightness that makes it conceivable falls from an invisible sun.”52

As if to relieve any doubt that the ideal form assumed by the world inside the

dream is identical to the form it acquires in Neo-Impressionism, Adam makes this claim

explicitly in “Au jour,” where he describes how Sapeline looks out of the window of his

apartment to see “landscapes that have stepped right out of the new painting.” More

particularly, when Sapeline does so, he beholds a scene resembling Signac’s Notre

Dame and the Île Saint-Louis, View of the Quai de la Tournelle, Sunlight of 1884 (fig.

14), in which

a river reflects doleful houses down to the bottom of its lapping waters. It lulls

them toward shadows under bridges, toward a great cathedral squatting between

its stone crutches and its prayer-towers, which points the single eye of its rose

window on to the teeming filth of the street. The town.53

Like the Saint-Briac landscape mentioned in Soi, Signac’s painting does not have

the synthetic quality Adam and Kahn singled out in their art criticism. Signac nonethe-

less undoubtedly knew the novel, so it is unlikely to be a coincidence that the paintings

he made of the Brittany port in 1890, such as Saint-Briac, The Beacons, Opus 210 (cat.

31), correspond more closely to the style Adam used in it.

Polychromy, Grayness, and Pallor

Mature Neo-Impressionist paintings like this are somewhat different from earlier syn-

thetic works such as the Grande Jatte or Apprêteuse et garnisseuse. These earlier

works Seurat and Signac reworked over the winter of 1885–86, laying a skein of small,

discrete “dots” or a coating of short, often vertically or horizontally orientated streaks

over earlier layers of broader brushwork that play the main role in defining forms. In

their fully developed Neo-Impressionist paintings, by contrast, they employed the new

technique wholesale rather than piecemeal, gradually diminishing the size of the strokes

of paint they applied as they brought the work forward, while heightening the saturation

of their color in such a way that the final, more finely divided surface emerges more or

less naturally from the more fused layers underneath. The great advantage of this tech-

nique is that it produced a coherent image with clear edges defined by the borders

between different areas of (often contrasting) color, thus avoiding the pitfall of haziness

threatening the Impressionist technique, while also integrating the dot to some extent

with the image it gives rise to, and thereby reducing the “confetti” effect.

Pissarro, Dubois-Pillet, and Charles Angrand all quickly adopted a systematically

divisionist technique of a more-or-less similar kind. The older artist’s success with the

Cat. 31. Paul Signac, Saint-Briac, The Beacons, Opus 210, 1890.

Oil on canvas, 25¾ × 32¼ in. (65.4 × 82 cm). Private collection.

60 SM I TH

technique is summed up in Albert Aurier’s perspicacious article “Camille Pissarro” of

March 1890, which maintains: “The first efforts in Neo-Impressionism, interesting but still

clumsy. . . . I declare that, for my part, I did smile ironically more than once in those days

before a painting made out of a mosaic of separate patches, incapable of being fused,

which called to mind the motley colors of Harlequin’s jacket. But little by little, Monsieur

Pissarro mastered the new technique he had adopted, this pointillist procedure.”54

The new technique had many advantages other than the verisimilitude Aurier

attributed to Pissarro. Adam, for instance, signaled its musical possibilities in his arti-

cle “Les artistes indépendants” of May 1887, explaining how the individual, component

touches of a Neo-Impressionist painting appear both to fuse together and to retain their

individuality, with the result that “the work will be perceived in accordance with the spe-

cial charm that belongs to listening to a symphony, in which, at the same time as the

combination of sounds is felt, the value of each orchestral element is experienced as a

unique and vibrant force.”55 Here, then, Adam effectively recapitulates an assertion he

had made earlier in Soi, regarding “the perfect harmony” Dubois-Pillet achieved in Seine

at Bercy by means of its “orchestral multitude of little spots.”56 But the reason Adam

insists on the melodic and harmonic qualities of the painting is that these give it consid-

erable moral weight, since they borrow from music its ability to expresses the deep, or

noumenal, reality behind appearances that Schopenhauer called “will.”

Signac also regarded color as musical, a conception echoed in the opus num-

bers he gave his paintings. He also used color of this kind in the lithographic advertise-

ment Application of M. Charles Henry’s Chromatic Circle (cat. 28) he made in 1888,

which gestures toward Henry’s conviction that “assigning colors” to a “direction” corre-

sponding to a “rhythmic interval on the chromatic circle” produces “virtual melodies”

and “harmonies of a thoroughly musical power.”57 Fénéon referred to the advertisement

Cat. 28. Paul Signac, Application of M. Charles

Henry’s Chromatic Circle, 1888. Lithograph,

6¼ × 7¼ in. (15.5 × 18 cm). Private collection.

cropping?

61 THE NEO - IMPRESS ION IST PA INTER

as a “polychromy,” implying it depicted the kind of luminous landscape capable of being

evoked by colored-glass screens that Kahn advocated in his article “L’Esthétique du

verre polychrome” of April 1886, which itself drew heavily on Henry’s ideas.58 Color is

also used here to evoke the incandescent world, like that of the artist’s own seascapes,

half-seen, half-imagined, by a Rückenfigur seated in a chair. The visionary dimension of

the work is also suggested by its similarity to the illustration by George Auriol accompa-

nying Baudelaire’s poem “L’Invitation au voyage,” which also appeared in December

1888 in La Lanterne Japonaise, in which a woman seen from behind is rapt in contem-

plation of a sailing boat on the horizon.59 Signac, an ardent sailor, would certainly have

shared her wonder and delight.

Recognizing the “brilliance” of color Signac achieved at this date, Adam referred

to him as a “miraculous colorist” in the dedication he wrote in the copy of L’Essence du

soleil he gave the painter in 1890.60 Adam’s Symbolist colleague Jean Ajalbert had sin-

gled out Signac’s “vibrant colors” as early as May 1886 in his poem “Fête nationale”

from the collection “Drapeaux,” which he dedicated to the painter.61 Here Ajalbert also

mentioned the “pallor” and “gray” that dominated in some of his earlier landscapes.

But although Signac turned his back on pastel and muted colors in his maturity, subtle

colors of this kind remained important for other Neo-Impressionists. Around 1888, for

example, Dubois-Pillet pioneered the incorporation of “passages,” or the subsidiary col-

ors supposedly produced (according to Rood) whenever we see a particular color.62 In

works such as The Marne River at Dawn of 1888 (fig. 15), this technique had the effect

of engendering a softly flickering, grayish tonality, which Beaubourg compared—a little

unkindly—to “a fine rain falling tranquil and serene.”63

Jokes of this kind did not necessarily imply hostility (any more than the decision

by Célestin Gardanne, in Beaubourg’s Contes pour les assassins of 1890, to murder his

uncle for preventing him from painting in the manner of “the new Pointillist school”).64

Rather, Seurat willingly supplied Beaubourg with material about Dubois-Pillet in a letter

of August 1890. In this, Seurat also gave the critic details of his own technique (which

he planned to use for a later article), stating that his aim was to achieve “harmony”

through the use of “contraries” and “closely related colors,” too.65 It is no surprise,

then, to find that Seurat had a greater preference for subdued color than Signac, as

attested in a letter of June 1886, in which he told his friend: “If you find Les Andelys

colorful, I see the Seine: an almost indefinable gray sea.”66

The elusively colored grays of the Seine estuary feature in many of Seurat’s

Honfleur paintings of 1886, but are especially arresting in the twilight painting

Embouchure de la Seine, soir (Museum of Modern Art, New York). Very likely, it is these

that are echoed in the sketch of “the breakwater during the ebb tide, evening” that

Seurat’s Symbolist associate Francis Poictevin published the following year in the prose-

poem “Honfleur.” This, in any event, describes how “the water . . . on the banks of gray

sand rising from the silt . . . is icy and lackluster, every now and again being caressed

by a faint slate-gray glow,” while “far away, the coastline of Le Havre still looks a faintly

bluish-gray.”67 In his review of the 1887 Les XX exhibition, Kahn also mentioned the

Fig. 17. Georges Seurat’s copy of Gustave

Kahn, Les Palais nomades (Paris: Tresse et

Stock, 1887). Pierre Saunier, Paris. Courtesy of

Sotheby’s Picture Library.

62 SM I TH

“gray strip of land” in Seurat’s L’Hospice et le phare d’Honfleur of 1886 (National

Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.).68

Seurat relished pallor just as much as gray, mixing significant quantities of white

into the balayé strokes defining the sea and sky in Harbor Entrance at Honfleur (fig. 16),

to the extent that these areas become almost colorless. It was almost certainly this

painting, then, that Kahn had in mind when he mentioned in his review: “In other, less

intense, marines . . . hues leech out their color and blend together toward something

glimpsed in the distance beyond the frame.”69 It was certainly in allusion to this passage

that Kahn inscribed the copy of Les Palais nomades of 1887 he gave Seurat with the

phrase: “His marines blench and leech out their color” (fig. 17).70 The significance of this

dedication (apart from the fact that it comes in the only book belonging to Seurat to have

reached the public domain) is that it connects the pastel quality of Seurat’s color to

Kahn’s own repeated use of the word “white” in his poetry in images designed to convey

abstract and elusive ideas.71 What lies behind this practice is Mallarmé’s poetry, which

Kahn revered, in which whiteness evokes absence and transcendent perfection by figuring

“abolition,” or the process whereby matter transmutes into spirit and pure musicality.72

Given that Seurat knew Mallarmé, too, it is not at all unlikely that he had similar ideas

about the metaphorical or expressive value of whiteness. Indeed, the blondness, and

sheer emptiness, of works such as The Channel of Gravelines, Grand-Fort Philippe of

1890 (cat. 34) strongly imply that Seurat willingly embraced Mallarmé’s love of blankness.

Utopia

The utopianism of Neo-Impressionist color is not confined to its dreamlike quality, how-

ever, since it also had an anarchist dimension in the work of Pissarro, Signac, and

Luce especially.

Pissarro’s anarchist convictions find an extended literary tribute in Paul Alexis’s

short story “Une belle vie” of 1885, a shaggy dog story in every sense that features

a mongrel named Fanfan Belleu. This animal is given by a farmer from Étampes (near

Auvers) to “an Impressionist landscape painter . . . nurtured on Fourrier [sic] and

Proudhon,” but it resolutely refuses to be kept on a leash, forcing the painter to allow

him to roam free.73 The moral, of course, is that an anarchist must allow his dog to live

as he would himself.

Values of the same kind are also implicit in the writings of the Naturalist writer

and former Communard Robert Caze, whose literary Salon included Alexis, Seurat,

Signac, and several Symbolist writers. Most especially, Caze confers an anarchist qual-

ity on the Impressionist paintings in his own collection in the novel La semaine d’Ursule

of 1885, which details the works encountered by the woman who cleans the study of his

personification, Monsieur Louazel, during her weekly rounds. These include a painting of

“greenery seized by Pissaro [sic] under the gleam of full sunlight.”74 Although the novel

does not mention the “studies by Seurat and Signac” that “hung next to one another” in

the same apartment, Alexis assimilated works by the younger painters to an anarchist

Fig. 15. Albert Dubois-Pillet, The Marne River at

Dawn, 1888. Oil on canvas, 9¼ × 181⁄8 in. (23.5 ×

46 cm). Musée d’Orsay, Paris.

63 THE NEO - IMPRESS ION IST PA INTER

position in 1886, when (as “Trublot”) he vaunted their radical and rebellious qualities in

the radical newspaper Le Cri du Peuple.75

As it did for Alexis, blue had a special political value for Pissarro and Signac, not

only because it was the color of the worker’s blouse, but also because it rendered a

scene intangible or immaterial when used extensively in a painting. But so, too, varied

color was demotic and indicative of freedom for these painters.76 It makes sense, then,

that Pissarro used a chromatically rich and vibrant harmony to express political accord

in his idealized painting of collaborative labor, Peasant Women Planting Poles in the

Ground of 1891 (cat. 32). So, too, did Signac in his anarchist utopia In the Era of

Harmony of 1893–95 (fig. 18).77 And rather as Pissarro applied scientific ideas about the

behavior of colors in his painting, Signac incorporated Henry’s ideas about their “direc-

tions” into his, and gave its drawing the simplified, “rhythmic” quality of the illustrations

he had made for the mathematician’s publications on the aesthetics of forms. The work

is thus a testament to the belief that human rationality will make it possible for a soci-

ety of the kind it represents to evolve and, by corollary, amounts implicitly to a refuta-

tion of revolutionary violence.78 In this respect, it is close in spirit to the play Les aubes

of 1898—which the Belgian socialist poet and critic Émile Verhaeren dedicated to

Signac—that tells the story of the people of a besieged Flemish town who, under the

leadership of the tribune and writer, Hérénien, throw off the regency oppressing them

and conclude a peace with their enemies, all without a drop of blood being spilled.79

Fig. 16. Georges Seurat, Harbor Entrance at

Honfleur, 1886. Oil on canvas, 18 × 21¾ in. (46

× 55 cm). Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo.

Cat. 33. Camille Pissarro, Design for a Fan: The Pea Stakers, 1890. Gouache over

black chalk on coarse brown paper, 16 × 25¼ in. (40.7 × 64.1 cm). Ashmolean

Museum, University of Oxford. Presented by the Pissarro Family, 1952.

Cat. 32. Camille Pissarro, Peasant Women Planting Poles in the Ground, 1891.

Oil on canvas, 21¼ × 181⁄8 in. (54 × 46 cm). On loan from a private collection,

Museums Sheffield, United Kingdom.

66 SM I TH

In the context of the early 1890s, the particular significance of Signac’s position

is that it stood against the politics of “propaganda by deed,” or the anarchist bombing

campaign instigated by the activist known as Ravachol in 1892. Fénéon was involved in

this and, together with Luce, was arrested in 1894 and tried along with the other defen-

dants in the so-called process des trente, with the critic famously avoiding prosecution

by pouring scorn on the prosecution’s case.80 It was probably in consternation, then, that

Signac noted in his journal for December 1894 that Fénéon supported the “anarchist

attacks” because of their “propaganda” value.81 For his part, Pissarro, who believed he

was under police surveillance, thought it best to leave the country temporarily.

Given the extreme seriousness of these events, it is surprising to find a discus-

sion about them in Le roman d’un singe, which is prompted by Yvonnel’s suggestion

that Halifax would do well to bring up Golo according to “anarchist theories.” Predict-

ably, Halifax counters that, even were he less “skeptical,” he could not support a politi-

cal creed based on “propaganda by deed” since “a series of tragic gestures” of this

kind “will draw down on itself the most the most terrible repression.” Halifax does not

argue that propaganda by deed is “the wrong way” because of its consequences for its

proponents, as opposed to its victims, however. Rather, his belief is that “earthly happi-

ness” will become a reality only if laws are restricted to a minimum, in order to allow a

maximum of human freedom, and if the class system is abolished in favor of an “intel-

lectual hierarchy.” Unsurprisingly, Yvonnel cuttingly describes this state of affairs as

“opportunist anarchy.” But it falls to Clara to tell Halifax he is an “unwitting reaction-

ary,” because although “propaganda by deed” is “reproachable,” it can “be forgiven for

awakening spirits from their slumbers.”82

Fig. 18. Paul Signac, In the Era of Harmony

(“The golden age is not in the past; it is in the

future”), 1893–95. Oil on canvas, 117 × 156 in.

(300 × 400 cm). Mairie de Montreuil, Paris.

67 THE NEO - IMPRESS ION IST PA INTER

Conclusion

Stories of this kind demonstrate that Neo-Impressionism could involve serious stuff, as

well as wonder and humor. To this extent, they reveal a fundamental difference between

the style as it was and the picture of it presented, obliquely, by Cohl. They show, in a

nutshell, that Neo-Impressionist painting could be complex, or lighthearted and solemn

at once. Another way of putting this is to suggest that Cohl’s and Allais’s monochromes

are essentially pretexts for jokes, while Neo-Impressionist paintings do much more. The

primary function of the monochrome, in other words, is to give pleasure (by affording

conceptual play), which is only sanctioned spuriously by appeal to any thoughts it

entails. By contrast, the paintings of Seurat, Signac, Pissarro, Dubois-Pillet, and their

colleagues not only license the visual pleasure they offer legitimately, by dint of the seri-

ousness of their depicted contents, but they use that pleasure to make their content

engaging. Neo-Impressionist paintings thus create a virtuous circle in which delight and

understanding facilitate each other, making the business of looking at them challenging

and rewarding at the same time, in a way unique to them.83

NOTES

1. See Félix Fénéon, “L’Impressionnisme aux

Tuileries,” L’Art Moderne 6 (September 19, 1886):

300–302, reprinted in Fénéon, Oeuvres, 1:53–58

(excerpt on 58). Unless otherwise stated, all transla-

tions are by the author.

2. Félix Fénéon, Les Impressionnistes en 1886

(Paris: La Vogue, 1886). This contained “VIIIe exposi-

tion impressionniste” (a version of “Les Impression-

nistes,” La Vogue 1, no. 8 [June 13–20, 1886]:

261–75), 5–26; “Ve exposition internationale” (a ver-

sion of “Ve exposition internationale de peinture et

de sculpture,” La Vogue, 1, no. 10 [June 28–July 5,

1886]: 341–46), 27–35; and “IIe exposition de la

Société des artistes indépendants” (a reworking of

“L’Impressionnisme aux Tuileries”), 37–43; reprinted

in Fénéon, Oeuvres, 29–38, 39–42, and 43–45. On

the publication of Les Impressionnistes en 1886, see

Halperin, Félix Fénéon, 95.

3. See Denys Riout, “Le peintre néoimpressionniste:

Une adaptation anticipatrice,” 1895: Mille huit cent

quatre-vingt-quinze, no. 53 (Émile Cohl) (2007): 258–

71 (excerpt on 262–63). On the monochromes, see

Catalogue de l’exposition des arts incohérents au

profit des pauvres de Paris (Paris: Chaix, 1883), no.

3; Catalogue de l’exposition des arts incohérents au

profit des grandes sociétés d’instruction gratuite

(Paris: Bernard, 1884), nos. 3 and 53; Alphonse

Allais, Album primo-avrilesque (Paris: Ollendorff,

1897); and Fénéon, Oeuvres, 12.

4. See Riout, “Peintre néoimpressionniste,” 266.

5. Ibid., 267–68.

6. See Marius Roux, The Substance and the Shadow,

trans. Dick Collins and Fiona Cox, ed. Paul Smith

(University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press,

2007), xxvi–xxxiii. See also John Rewald, The History

of Impressionism (London: Secker and Warburg,

1973), 412–13; and Rewald, Studies in

Impressionism (New York: Abrams, 1985), 147–48.

7. O. Chelette, “Pour être décoré,” Le Pêle-Mêle,

December 18, 1904.

8. See Camille de Saint Croix, Cent contes secs dits

par Coquelin Cadet de la Comédie Française (Paris:

Ollendorff, 1894), 222–25.

9. Ibid., 224–25. According to Paul Signac, “Le néo-

impressionnisme: Documents,” Gazette des Beaux-

Arts 6 (February 1934): 49–59 (this excerpt on 58),

“chromo-luminarisme” was the term Seurat preferred

to use to describe his technique. See also Signac,

Delacroix, 73. For an essay on “chromo-lumina-

risme,” see Alphonse Germain, Pour le beau: Essai

68 SM I TH

de kallistique (Paris: Girard, 1893), 21–28. The

potential of Mauvel’s painting for stylistic ambiguity

may be connected to the fact that Neo-Impressionism

and Neo-Traditionism had recently been discussed

together in La Plume 3, no. 57 (September 1, 1891).

In this issue, see Alphonse Germain, “Théorie

chromo-luminariste,” 285–87; and Germain, “Théorie

des déformateurs,” 289–90. See also the series of

articles under the heading “Chromo-luminaristes”:

Jules Christophe, “Georges Seurat,” 292, and “Paul

Signac,” 292 and 299, reprinted in Fénéon, Oeuvres,

197–99; Jules Antoine, “Dubois-Pillet,” 299; and

Georges Darien, “Maximilien Luce,” 299–300; and

the series under the heading “Néo-Traditionnistes”:

Albert Aurier, “Paul Gauguin,” 300; Émile Bernard,

“Vincent van Gogh,” 300–301; and Adolphe Retté,

“Maurice Denis,” 301. Denis’s Catholique mystery of

1890 also employed a divisionist facture at the same

time as the “hieratic simplicity” he advocated in his

“Définition de néo-traditionnisme,” first published in

the same year; see Maurice Denis, Théories (Paris:

L’Occident, 1912), 1–13 (excerpt on 12).

10. See Riout, “Peintre néoimpressionniste,” 267.

11. See ibid., 266; and Henri Meilhac and Ludovic

Halévy, La Cigale (Paris: Calman Lévy, 1878), 132.

Here Marignan says the “Impressionists” are also

“Intentionists,” a term implying artists whose

ambitions exceed their competence. See Victor

Fournel, “Exposition des impressionnistes,” Le

Correspondant, April 25, 1877, 323–35, reprinted in

Ruth Berson, ed., The New Painting: Impressionism,

1874–1886: Documentation (San Francisco: Fine

Arts Museums of San Francisco, 1996), 1:146–47;

Roux, Substance, 178 and 179n184; Bertall, “Exposi-

tion des indépendants: Ex-impressionnistes, demain

intentionnistes,” L’Artiste, June 1, 1879, 396–98,

reprinted in Berson, ed., New Painting, 212–13;

Pierre Véron, Galop general (Paris: Dentu, 1885),

121–22; Charles Joliet, Roman incoherent (Paris:

Jules Lévy, 1887), 48; Félicien Champsaur, Le défilé

(Paris: Havard, 1887), 140; and Champsaur, L’amant

des danseuses (Paris: Dentu, 1888), 12.

12. See Riout, “Peintre néoimpressionniste,” 269–71.

13. See Jean Lorrain, La petite classe (Paris: Ollen-

dorff, 1895), 62–67 (excerpt on 65).

14. Lorrain, Petite classe, 66, according to which the

work represents “a line of angels winged in the man-

ner of swans, with sword in hand, haranguing a gar-

goyle that has escaped from the painted backdrop of

a traveling fair.” The painting is named and described

in Fénéon, Oeuvres, 210–11, in which “upright,

leaning against an immense cruciate sword, the

Angel sees but does not look at a monster, which,

under the form of the hideous orthoptera known as

the praying mantis, graciously symbolizes everything

for us.” (A more conventional portrait is illustrated

under this title, however, in Joséphin Peladan, Geste

esthétique: Catalogue du salon de la Rose + Croix

[Paris: Durand-Ruel, 1892], 52.) On Rochefoucauld

(a founder of the Rose + Croix, the financier of

“boutique néo” in the rue Lafitte, and author of an

article on Signac, whom he met in 1890), see Anne

Distel, “Portrait of Paul Signac: Yachtsman, Writer, In-

dépendant, and Revolutionary,” in Ferretti-Bocquillon

et al., Signac (1863–1935), 37–50 (excerpt on 43);

and ibid., 142–43. See also Tiphereth [Antoine de la

Rochefoucauld], “Paul Signac,” Le Coeur, no. 2 (May

1893): 1–5.

15. See Maurice Beaubourg, “Beaux-arts (La mort de

Dubois Pillet et de Vincent van Gogh),” La Revue In-

dépendante 16, no. 47 (September 1890): 391–402

(excerpt on 396).

16. See Joris-Karl Huysmans, “L’Exposition des

indépendants en 1880,” in L’Art moderne (Paris:

Charpentier, 1883), 85–123 (excerpt on 89–90).

On the Impressionists and Daltonism, see Oscar

Reutersvärd, “The Violettomania of the Impression-

ists,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 9, no.

2 (1950): 106–110; and Paul Smith, “‘Parbleu’: Pis-

sarro and the Political Colour of an Original Vision,”

Art History 15, no. 2 (June 1992): 235 and 245n55.

17. See Maurice Vaucaire, Est-ce vivre? (Paris, 1889),

103–9 (excerpt on 103 and 105). The story later

mentions paintings resembling the work of “Degas”

and “Zambinello” (Zandomeneghi), among others.

18. Vaucaire, Est-ce vivre? 104. See Bailly-Herzberg,

ed., Correspondance, 2:142, for a letter to Lucien of

March 15 concerning “a frame” comprising “a white

margin of roughly 0.03 (cm) around the painting,

a flat surface of 0.09 (cm) in oak and one of 0.03

(cm) in gilded laurel to finish with”; and ibid., 144,

for a letter of March 17 describing “frames made in

oak with gilded laurel and white bands next to the

painting.” See also Thorold, ed., Letters, 83–85. On

the frames adopted by Seurat and his colleagues,

see Fénéon’s article, “Le Néo-Impressionnisme,”

L’Art Moderne 7 (May 1, 1887), reprinted in Fénéon,

Oeuvres, 71–76, esp. 74, which mentions how “this

summer Neo-Impressionism will have broad frames

in oak with an interior border of several centime-

ters in white,” and also describes the “astragals”

in Dubois-Pillet’s frames, and the “matte gold” on

Angrand’s. See also ibid., 83–84, for remarks on

Angrand’s frames and the painted frames used by

Dubois-Pillet and Seurat in 1888; and Ward, Pissarro,

Neo-Impressionism, 118–22. For exhibitions involving

Seurat, Signac, Camille and Lucien Pissarro, and

Angrand at the offices of La Revue Indépendante

69 THE NEO - IMPRESS ION IST PA INTER

in 1887–88, see Fénéon, Oeuvres, 92–94, 98, and

114–17. On the exhibition of Neo-Impressionist paint-

ings at the Théâtre Libre (in 1887), see Bogomila

Welsh-Ovcharov, Van Gogh à Paris (Paris: Musée

d’Orsay, 1988), 34; and (at unspecified dates) Désiré

Luc [Félix Fénéon], “André Antoine,” Les Hommes

d’Aujourd’hui 7, no. 341 (1890); and Aurelien Lugné-

Poë, Le Sot du tremplin: Souvenirs et impressions de

théâtre (Paris: Gallimard, 1930), 104.

19. Vaucaire, Est-ce vivre? 105. The painting depicts

“a pale woman” drinking blood in terror in a building

where more blood pools on the floor, toward which

“men with Herculean arms drag surly cattle.”

20. See J.-K. Huysmans, “Chronique d’art: Les indé-

pendants,” La Revue Indépendante 3, no. 6 (April

1887): 53–44, cited in Henri Dorra and John Rewald,

Seurat: L’Oeuvre peint, biographie, catalogue critique

(Paris: Les Beaux-Arts, 1959), 162. See also Jane

Block, “Les XX: Forum of the Avant-Garde,” in Block,

Belgian Art, 17–40 (esp. 27–28).

21. On Neo-Impressionist “confetti,” see Yvanhoé

Rambosson, “Le mois artistique,” Mercure de France

8, no. 5 (May 1893): 74–78 (excerpt on 76), cited in

Werth, Joy of Life, 268n59; 76.

22. See Léon Donnay, La besace (Paris: Librairie

Internationale, 1899), 281–84 (excerpt on 284).

23. See Alphonse Allais, Rose et vert-pomme (Paris:

Ollendorff, 1894), 1–11 (excerpt on 2–4).

24. See Fénéon, Oeuvres, 58.

25. Ibid. Fénéon first mentioned Henry’s work in an

unpublished letter to Édouard Dujardin, 17 October

1885, in the Bibliothèque littéraire Jacques Doucet

(MNR Ms 28–10).

26. For a more detailed discussion, see Smith,

Seurat and the Avant-Garde, 142–55. See also Ward,

Pissarro, Neo-Impressionism, 125–31.

27. Paul Adam, “Au jour,” La Revue Indépendante 4,

no. 10 (August 1887): 194–215 (excerpt on 208).

28. Georges Vanor, L’Art symboliste (Paris: Vanier,

1889), 11.

29. See Félix Fénéon, “Le Néo-Impressionnisme à

la quatrième exposition des artistes indépendants,”

L’Art Moderne 8 (April 15, 1888): 121–23, reprinted

in Fénéon, Oeuvres, 84–85. Seurat’s interest in the

Cercle chromatique is mentioned in Gustave Kahn,

“Seurat,” L’Art Moderne 11 (April 5, 1891): 107–10

(esp. 109); and Homer, Seurat, 191–98, 217–34,

and 296–97, which cites Georges Lecomte, Camille

Pissarro (Paris: Bernheim-Jeune, 1922), 25, on how

Seurat would simplify Henry’s complex ideas and

demonstrations for Pissarro.

30. Félix Fénéon, “Paul Signac,” Les Hommes

d’Aujourd’hui 8, no. 373 (May 1890), reprinted in

Fénéon, Oeuvres, 174–79 (excerpt on 177–78), cited

in Ferretti-Bocquillon et al., Signac (1863–1935),

162. Here Fénéon also points out that Signac

had collaborated with Henry on his Application de

nouveaux instruments de précision (cercle chroma-

tique, rapporteur et triple décimètre esthétiques) a

l’archéologie (Paris: Leroux, 1890), and was currently

at work on Henry’s L’Education du sense des forms,

which was eventually published as Quelques apercus

sur l’esthétique des forms (Paris: Nony, 1895). Fé-

néon reiterates much of this information in “Signac”

(1891), which also distances the painter’s achieve-

ment from science; see Ferretti-Bocquillon et al.,

Signac (1863–1935), 161.

31. See Fénéon, Oeuvres, 174.

32. See Gustave Kahn, La Vogue 1, no. 4 (May 2,

1886): 109–12 (esp. 110). The fact that Fénéon used

this “drawing” in place of the circular vignette of a

park and bench that Signac made as the frontispiece

to Jean Ajalbert’s Sur les talus (Paris, 1886) would

indicate it was in some real sense meant to be a

landscape—as would its shape, Fénéon having advo-

cated circular and oval formats for landscapes in “Le

Neo-Impressionnisme” of May 1887; see Fénéon,

Oeuvres, 74.

33. Armand Charpentier, Le roman d’un singe (Paris:

Ollendorff, 1895). On this novel, and Charpentier’s

friendship with Fénéon, see Halperin, Félix Fénéon,

12, 57, and 159. Many romans à clef, sometimes

subtitled “roman parisien” or “roman contemporain,”

contained avatars whose real-life models were meant

to recognized. See also Saint Croix, Cent contes,

223, regarding “a roman à clef whose hero would be

modeled photographically upon Mauvel’s well-known

physiognomy, and readily recognizable to the society

of the boulevards, clubs, and studios.”

34. See Charpentier, Roman, 41–43.

35. See “Médaillon,” Le Decadent, no. 25 (Septem-

ber 25, 1886).

36. See Charpentier, Roman, 40: “His head held

high, its bone structure entirely visible and length-

ened by a curvilinear goatee, his shaven lips describ-

ing the mouth of a preacher, his restless eyes living

out purely inward daydreams or lost in contemplation

of his surroundings, a straight, not at all thick nose,

his neck bare . . . thus, at the most unexpected

times and in the most unusual places, appeared the

silhouette of Félix Yvonnel.”

37. See Paul Adam, Le vice filial (Paris: 1898), 49

and 54 (which alludes to the fact that the portrait

was exhibited at the 1891 Indépendants). This

70 SM I TH

distasteful novel was first published by Kolb in 1891

and details the mental and moral decline of the char-

acter, Gisèle, who comes to form an incestuous de-

sire for her father, Arsénius (a composer and roué),

who rejects her advances, causing her to commit

suicide. See also ibid., 75–76, which describes how

Gisèle, having just rejected Arsénius’s suggestions

that she marry the “novelist,” Madal, or the “Impres-

sionist,” Loris, rebuffs his suggestion of “Fénéon”

with: “I adore him, but this would mean accepting

the subordinate role in advance, which I could not

agree to.” On Fénéon’s misogyny, see Halperin, Félix

Fénéon, 12.

38. Unpublished letter from Paul Signac to Henri-

Edmond Cross, 30 November 1891, Signac Archives.

I am grateful to Cornelia Homburg for this reference.

39. See Fénéon, Oeuvres, 34 and 47–48.

40. I am grateful to Pierre Saunier for showing me

this copy. On the edition of this pamphlet, see Hal-

perin, Félix Fénéon, 95.

41. See the letter from Fénéon to either Édouard

Dujardin or Téodor de Wyzewa, 19 March 1886, Bib-

liothèque littéraire Jacques Doucet (MNR ms 28–22).

42. See Félix Fénéon, “L’Impressionnisme,” L’Eman-

cipation Sociale, April 17, 1887, reprinted in Fénéon,

Oeuvres, 64–68 (esp. 68). On Fénéon’s ambivalent

sexuality, see Halperin, Félix Fénéon, 12–13. Several

of the letters Fénéon addressed to Dujardin are

patently flirtatious.

43. See Charpentier, Roman, 120 and 125, which

informs the reader that her “philosophical mind,

capable of the most difficult concepts and subtle

paradoxes” causes Yvonnel to experience “a cerebral

sympathy” for her, and hence to overcome the “indul-

gence born of pity” with which he habitually treated

women.

44. See Fénéon, Oeuvres, 74. The list also includes

Pissarro, quite inappropriately.

45. For Seurat’s remark, see Gustave Kahn,

“Chronique de la littérature et de l’art,” La Revue

Indépendante 6, no. 15 (January 1888): 124–46

(this excerpt, from the section “Exposition Puvis de

Chavannes,” is on 143). See also Félix Fénéon, “Cer-

tains,” Art et Critique, December 14, 1889, reprinted

in Fénéon, Oeuvres, 171–73 (esp. 172), which men-

tions how “Monsieur Gustave Kahn and Monsieur

Paul Adam, bent on transposing the everyday into

a logical dream . . . saw the counterparts of their

own research in the works of the Neo-Impressionists

and . . . put Pissarro, Signac, Seurat, Dubois-Pillet,

Angrand and Luce into words.”

46. Gustave Kahn, “La vie artistique,” La Vie Mod-

erne 9, no. 15 (April 9, 1887): 229–31 (excerpt on

229).

47. Paul Adam, “Peintres impressionnistes,” La

Revue Contemporaine 4 (April [May] 1886): 541–51

(excerpt on 547). See also Herbert, Neo-Impression-

ism, 16–17.

48. Adam, “Peintres impressionnistes,” 542. On the

Schopenhauerean dimension of Adam’s essay, see

Smith, Seurat and the Avant-Garde, 88–94.

49. Adam, “Peintres impressionnistes,” 542–43.

50. Paul Adam, Soi (Paris: Stock, 1886), 418–20. On

this novel, see Smith, Seurat and the Avante-Garde,

88–94. Fénéon cites the continuation of this passage

in “Ve Exposition internationale,” where he also

names and describes Dubois-Pillet’s painting; see

Fénéon, Oeuvres, 44.

51. See Balthazar de Moncouys [Paul Adam],

“Symbolistes et décadents: Les personalités sym-

bolistes,” La Vie Moderne (November 27, 1886):

757–59 (excerpt on 758). Adam’s style compares

closely to Fénéon’s; see Fénéon, Oeuvres, xxxv–xlix;

and Halperin, Félix Fénéon, 96–98.

52. Adam, Soi, 422.

53. Adam, “Au jour,” 207.

54. Albert Aurier, “Camille Pissarro,” La Revue Indé-

pendante 14, no. 41 (March 1890): 503–15 (excerpt

on 508). The continuation of this passage is cited in

part in Ward, Pissarro, Neo-Impressionism, 168.

55. Paul Adam, “Les artistes indépendants,” La

Revue Rose 3, no. 5 (May 1887): 139–45 (excerpts

on 142). This description alludes to the phenomenon

of “luster” described in Ogden Rood, Théorie scienti-

fique des couleurs (Paris: Baillère, 1881), 241–42.

56. Adam, Soi, 420, cited in Fénéon, “Ve Exposition

international,” in Oeuvres, 44.

57. See Charles Henry, Cercle chromatique (Paris:

Verdin, 1888), 69. For an explanation of how this

design relates to Henry’s ideas, see Félix Fénéon,

“Calendrier de Septembre: L’affiche de M. Paul

Signac,” La Revue Indépendante 10, no. 24 (October

1888): 137–38, reprinted in Fénéon, Oeuvres,

117–18. See also Félix Fénéon, “Un affiche,” La

Cravache, September 5, 1888, reprinted in Fénéon,

Oeuvres, 131.

58. See Fénéon, “Un affiche”; and Gustave Kahn,

“L’esthétique du verre polychrome,” La Vogue, 1,

no. 2 (April 18, 1886): 54–65 (excerpt on 65). Fénéon

later cited a phrase from this article as an epigraph

to “Le Néo-impressionnisme”; see Fénéon, Oeuvres,

71 THE NEO - IMPRESS ION IST PA INTER

71. See also Smith, Seurat and the Avant-Garde,

101–3.

59. See La Lanterne Japonaise, no. 6 (December 1,

1888). This was the house journal of the café-concert

Le Divan Japonais, of which Seurat made a drawing

in 1887–88.

60. Paul Adam, L’Essence du soleil (Paris: Tresse

et Stock, 1890), copy in the Signac Archives. I am

grateful to Cornelia Homburg for this reference. See

Signac, Delacroix, where the author discusses “bril-

liance” of color some thirty times.

61. See Jean Ajalbert, “Drapeaux,” La Pléaide, no. 3

(May 1886): 75–78; and Marie Thérèse Lemoyne de

Forges, Signac (Paris: Musée du Louvre, 1964), 4.

62. See Rood, Théorie scientifique, 94, which

explains how any particular wavelength will not only

stimulate the set of cones that is maximally sensitive

to it, but the two remaining sets as well, although

more weakly. (Thus, red, for example, will normally

give rise to faint sensations of blue and green.) On

Dubois-Pillet and “passage,” see Jules Christophe,

“Albert Dubois–Pillet,” Les Hommes d’Aujourd’hui 8,

no. 370 (1890); and John Gage, “Seurat’s Silence,”

in Colour and Meaning (London: Thames and

Hudson, 1999), 218–27 (esp. 223). See also Ward,

Pissarro, 117.

63. See Beaubourg, “Beaux-arts,” 394–95.

64. See Maurice Beaubourg, “Célestin Gardanne,”

in Contes pour les assassins (Paris: Perrin, 1890)

143–99, esp. 164.

65. For this letter, known as Seurat’s “esthétique,”

see Dorra and Rewald, Seurat, lllxxii; and Herbert et

al., Georges Seurat (1859–1891), 429–31. See also

Beaubourg, “Beaux-arts,” 394–95, where the author

declares, “I propose one day to return at greater

length to Monsieur Seurat and his school.”

66. See Dorra and Rewald, Seurat, l–li, letter of 25

June 1886.

67. Francis Poictevin, “Normandie, été,” La Revue

Indépendante 5, no. 12 (October 1887): 44–94

(excerpt on 52). On Seurat and Poictevin, see Smith,

“Souls of Glass,” in Smith, ed., Seurat Re-Viewed,

199–221, esp. 220n68.

68. Gustave Kahn, “La vie artistique,” La Vie Mod-

erne 9, no. 15 (April 9, 1887): 229–31 (excerpt on

230).

69. Ibid.

70. Gustave Kahn, Les Palais nomades (Paris:

Tresse et Stock, 1887). I am grateful to Pierre

Saunier for showing me this copy, which was lot 57 in

the sale at Sotheby’s, Paris, of December 15, 2010:

Rimbaud, Verlaine, Mallarmé and Their Friends:

Books, Manuscripts and Photographs from the Poeti-

cal Collection of Eric and Marie-Hélène B.

71. See Kahn, Palais nomades, 11, 38–39, 41,

58–59, 61, 141, and 159.

72. See Richard Hobbs, “Seurat and Mallarméan

Thought,” in Smith, Seurat Re-Viewed, 223–40, esp.

235 and 238.

73. See Paul Alexis, Le besoin d’aimer (Paris: Char-

pentier, 1885), 189–98 (excerpt on 192).

74. See Robert Caze, “Samedi,” in La semaine

d’Ursule (Paris: Tresse, 1885), 253–90 (excerpt on

263).

75. These works are mentioned in Henri de Régnier,

Nos rencontres (Paris: Mercure de France, 1931),

79. See also Dorra and Rewald, Seurat, 100; and

Herbert et al., Georges Seurat (1859–1891), 109–10.

On Alexis’s criticism, see Smith, “Parbleu,” 234–38.

76. See Smith, “Parbleu,” 225–34.

77. On Signac’s use of color harmony to express

political accord, see Robyn Roslak, “The Politics of

Aesthetic Harmony: Neo-Impressionism, Science,

and Anarchism,” Art Bulletin 73, no. 3 (September

1991): 381–90, esp. 384 and 386.

78. On rationality (and harmony) in Signac’s painting,

see Richard Thomson, “Ruins, Rhetoric and Revolu-

tion: Paul Signac’s ‘Le Démolisseur’ and Anarchism

in the 1890s,” Art History 36, no. 2 (April 2013):

376–78.

79. Émile Verhaeren, Les aubes (Brussels: Deman,

1898).

80. See Halperin, Félix Fénéon, 267–95.

81. See Thomson, “Ruins,” 375–76, citing Rewald,

ed., “Extraits, I,” 97–128 (excerpt on 113).

82. See Charpentier, Roman, 175–78.

83. See Richard Wollheim, “Freud and the Under-

standing of Art,” in On Art and the Mind (London:

Allen Lane, 1973), 202–19, esp. 215–17.